In Warhammer Fantasy Battle you can give your characters special weapons and Darrell takes some time to talk about how them, more specifically how they take precedence over your characters standard weapon.

Yeah you must always use the “best” be it a magical weapon or a mundane special weapon but if the best gets destroyed you go down to the next best, till you end up with only a hand weapon.

I’m not sure if choppas or any other examples where a race has a basic weapon that isn’t JUST a hand weapon are immune from things that can destroy weapons though, certainly in the last edition I’m pretty sure it said models always count as having a hand weapon if everything else is lost.

i think that only items that you pay extra for can be destroyed. for example, if your unit has hand weapons and light armour already in their basic profile and they take sheilds as well, only the sheilds can actually be destroyed.

Yes this one change that my temple guard didn’t like to much as in the previous rule book if you had 2 normal weapons like well the temple guard who have shields, hand weapons and Halberds as at the start of the combat you could choose which to use which meant say I got charged by knights I would use the hand weapon and shield to give them 2+ save and the next turn when they went back to str 3 smack them with the halberds.

I can see why they’ve done it and magic weapons are still you will use this first no matter what but I do miss the ability to switch between hand weapons and special weapons was quite useful for infantry.

I would say if you had to pay for the upgrades and it doesn’t specifically say “replace X with Y” then you should be able to get to use any weapons you have on the models. So if you have HW and Shield and Spears, and within the limits of the rules, you can use either the spear or HW & shield. Similar to the black orcs and their pile o’choppas. It should be modeled on though, maybe carrying the spear with shield and Hw strapped to their back or whatnot… at least the front rank The question is whether you can switch weapons in the middle of a combat… I don’t think so. I think you choose what weapon you want to use at the start of a combat then use that for all that combat. If you manage to get in a second combat then you can switch weapons. Then the extra weapons a unit may carry just gives them flexibility before they actually engage in combat, not during.

it says in the Bretonnian army book that if (mounted only) you take a magic weapon and a weapon that gives you a charge bonus (lance or spear for cav) you use the charge weapon on the turn you charge, and then the magic weapon in subsequent rounds of combat. This is how i use my Bretonnian Lord, he has a lance and a sword of might, when he charges, he uses his lance but then switches to the magic sword in the 2nd round of combat automatically